Word: acters
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Elaine May is a corrosively perceptive satirist with a mean comic punch. Her off-Broadway one-acter Adaptation, the first of a double bill completed by Terrence McNally's Next, makes one laugh till it hurts, partly because the ache of recognition is in every line and situation. She has the wit to see that if Pavlov's dogs salivated at the tinkle of bells signifying food, modern man is not so very different. He salivates at psychological flash cards marked Emotional Maturity, Identity Crisis, Making a Commitment, as well as at traditional cues for action such...
...Typist is a real live one-acter, unlike the other skits. It alone demands sobriety for appreciation. At fifteen, when I first saw the play, it seemed pretty boring just to have two typists sitting on stage talking. But to the credit of Miss Austin and her cast, things livened up for me second time around, although a judicious speed-up of pacing still could have helped the production...
SOME PEOPLE over at Quincy House have pulled a neat stunt this week. They have produced two one-act plays, but somehow ended up with about five-sixths of one one-acter. I guess it shows a certain amount of good old American ingenuity on their part, but it also makes for an unfortunately disturbing evening of theatre...
Unless one happens to be a voyeur, it is sexier to imagine plays with nudes than to actually see them. Sweet Eros is no exception to this rule, even though the naked girl (Sally Kirkland) in this off-Broadway one-acter by Terrence Mc-Nally is on view for almost an hour. The skin show is more abstract than erotic, and terribly sedate. The girl is bound to a chair and gagged most of the time, and initially clothed. Possibly the most exciting scene in this distinctly lethargic drama is the one in which she is undressed by her captor...
...second one-acter called Witness finds McNally in fine comic and caustic fettle. Again a gagged victim is trussed up in a chair, this time a man. His captor (Joe Ponazecki) hopes to assassinate the President of the U.S. during a motorcade, and he wants a witness to his own sanity in committing the act. The stuff of madness has been crammed into this young would-be assassin's head, principally by avid newspaper reading and televiewing. He knows all about cabinet crises in Lebanon, but he doesn't know right from wrong. He hopes to resolve...